The Wall Street Journal - USA (2020-11-16)

A10| Monday, November 16, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

trying negotiation, and the so- called peaceful, rational and nonviolent way. I don’t want to say it’s useless, but we can see no sign that there was any improvement in all those years,” said Owan Li, a 28- year-old activist who was in the student government at Hong Kong Polytechnic Uni- versity when it became the scene of fiery clashes with police last year. “All I can say is, all these years I have been doing this for Hong Kong, not for myself,” Mr. Lee said of such criticism, in an interview on the day before the national security law went into effect. He was sur- rounded by a few mementos in an otherwise spare office: a letter from Bill Clinton, a bust of Winston Churchill, and a photo of himself, calling for democracy from the balcony of the city’s legislature. What sealed Hong Kong’s fate, he said, was China’s deepening authoritarianism under leader Xi Jinping. Mr. Xi has centralized power since taking office in 2012 and seeks a more assertive Chinese role on the world stage. The exis- tence of an open society oper- ating within China became in- compatible with Mr. Xi’s vision of tighter control, Mr. Lee said, accusing the Chinese leader of using the unrest as a pretext to bring Hong Kong under his authority. “To him the most important thing now is to ensure his party remains firmly in control, and he remains firmly in control,” said Mr. Lee. For the first time in a career of activism carried out meticulously inside the law, Mr. Lee, 82 years old, is facing a criminal charge, after being arrested this year for partici- pating in a huge unauthorized march in 2019. He is out on bail and fighting the charge. The new security law, which criminalizes acts such as provoking hatred against the central government, has chilled free speech. After it was published, Mr. Lee—once nearly ubiquitous in the press criticizing attempts to erode Hong Kong’s freedoms—can- celed a scheduled interview with The Wall Street Journal. He has since declined all media requests for comment on the security law, which isn’t retroactive, leaving his June interview with the Journal among his last on the subject.

With the lawful path of activism closing, he worried that the younger generation of democracy protesters who spent months battling police with Molotov cocktails could em- brace underground militancy as a last resort, an idea he op- poses. “There are people pressed into a corner,” Mr. Lee said in June. “They don’t see any future for Hong Kong.”

Rising movement Britain’s agreement to re- turn Hong Kong to China in 1997 meant putting millions of subjects under the authority of a Communist regime that many of these people had fled. Before he became known as the father of Hong Kong’s democracy movement, Mr. Lee was one of these people, a young boy in 1949 escaping China with his family for the then-sleepy British colony. As China descended into economic chaos under Mao Zedong, free-market Hong Kong grew first into a bustling manufacturing hub and later a global financial center. Mr. Lee rose with his city. By his early 40s he was chair- man of Hong Kong’s bar associ- ation, a revered Queen’s Coun- sel and one of the city’s highest paid lawyers, moving seam- lessly between the Chinese and English-speaking worlds of the thriving international city. After turning toward prode- mocracy activism, Mr. Lee became an incessant critic of both China’s communist regime and Hong Kong’s British colonial government. Britain gov-

erned Hong Kong with laissez- faire liberalism when it came to commerce. But British Hong Kong wasn’t a democracy. Brit- ish-appointed governors ruled as authoritarians, arriving in colonial regalia such as plumed helmets through the 1980s. Mr. Lee demanded that Brit- ish authorities introduce de- mocracytomakeithardfor China to roll it back after the handover. Beijing opposed the idea. When Britain backed down, Mr. Lee derided British negotiators as “China hands” sacrificing Hong Kong in hopes of better relations with Beijing. “Martin was endlessly and properly critical of Britain’s role in the last years of our colonial responsibility in Hong Kong,” said Chris Patten, Brit- ain’s last colonial governor, who accelerated democratic change from 1992 to 1997. “The only thing I think we could have done, looking back, was to start the development of democratic institutions earlier, so that people could get used to it, with all of its faults and its constraints.” A handful of seats in the legislature were eventually opened to direct voting in the 1991 election. As a candidate, a year after co-founding the United Democrats of Hong Kong party, Mr. Lee led the pro-democracy camp to victory in 16 of the 18 seats open for citywide voting. Mr. Lee’s father, a lieuten- ant general in the Kuomintang ousted by Mao, had warned him to be wary of the Commu- nist Party when Beijing invited Mr. Lee to join the committee drafting Hong Kong’s constitu-

Martin Lee, by the time he joined this march in 2016, above, had been a force in Hong Kong’s democracy movement for three decades. Below, candidate Lee and his wife, Amelia, flanking their son, cast their ballots in Hong Kong’s 1991 legislative election.

FROM TOP: YEUNG KWAN/EYEPRESS; SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST/GETTY IMAGES

tion in the 1980s. “The Communists cannot be trusted,” Mr. Lee recalled his father’s message. “If they want to make use of you, they will give you anything you want. Money, women, position, ev- erything. But when they are finished making use of you, not only will they throw you down on the ground, but they will step all over you.” Mr. Lee joined the drafting effort anyway. He had reason to be hopeful. In the 1980s, China was emerging from the darkness of the Cultural Revo- lution under a policy of “re-

form and opening up” led by Deng Xiaoping. “The rest of the world, including me, thought so long as China can keep modernizing herself along the Hong Kong line, then China and Hong Kong would go down the same route,” he said. “Democracy for China, democracy for Hong Kong.” Hope for a more open China turned to horror on June 4, 1989 when the People’s Libera- tion Army ended the large pro-democracy protest in Bei- jing’s Tiananmen Square with a massacre. On the night of the handover, China skeptics feared Mr. Lee might be put in jail the mo-

‘All these years I have been doing this for Hong Kong, not for myself.’

FROM PAGE ONE

Kong was also one for Mr. Lee,
whose long career has been
intertwined with the city’s
suddenly collapsing bid to pre-
serve its Western-style free-
doms. A London-trained bar-
rister, he turned to activism
after the U.K. began negotiat-
ing the handover to China in
the 1980s. He helped write the
city’s constitution, and after
helping open a minority of
legislative seats to direct vot-
ing, led Hong Kong’s pro-de-
mocracy camp to victories
that made him the face of the
movement until he retired
from the legislature in 2008.
He exuded hope bordering
on faith that democracy would
someday flourish not only in
Hong Kong, but in all of China.
He believed that the success of
the global business center oper-
ating semiautonomously within
the People’s Republic of China
might someday serve as a bea-
con for the benefits of greater
political and economic opening.

Dream of democracy

The dream of democracy in
Hong Kong, seeded by Mr. Lee
and others and kept alive by
successive generations, is
crashing around them. Near
midnight on June 30—almost
exactly 23 years after the U.K.
lowered its flag—Beijing im-
posed a sweeping security law
to crush pro-democracy dis-
sent. Under it, agents from
mainland China have broad
authority to enforce laws
against sedition, secession and
foreign collusion in the city—
most with sentences of up to
life in prison. The U.S. has de-
clared that Hong Kong has lost
any practical autonomy.
Mr. Lee’s moderate brand of
activism has been rendered
unviable or illegal. His visits to
Washington over the decades
to build support for Hong
Kong’s democracy movement
are now criminalized. Protests
are essentially banned and
some slogans are considered
illegal. Teenagers have been
arrested for posting about in-
dependence on social media,
and pro-democracy books re-
moved from library shelves.
Once a symbol of the city’s
democratic promise, Mr. Lee
himself is becoming marginal-
ized. Pro-Beijing elites always
saw him as a troublemaker.
Now, even some in the middle
class who aren’t friends of
Beijing either say the democ-
racy movement he helped
found missed chances to com-
promise that could have
warded off a crackdown. By
contrast, many of the student-
aged protesters who battled
police in the streets last year
say his generation, working
within the law, failed to con-
front China strongly enough to
deliver democracy.
When Mr. Lee warned last
year that the protesters’ in-
creasing use of force would
backfire, the online chat rooms
that served as the central ner-
vous system of the protest
movement lighted up with crit-
icism for the long-respected
barrister and politician.
“When it comes to the Mar-
tin Lee generation, they were

ContinuedfromPageOne

ment Britain lowered its flag. After the handover, Mr. Lee and pro-democracy candidates continued to win legislative seats open to popular vote, forging a noisy if symbolic op- position. Younger generations of democracy leaders adopted Mr. Lee’s idealism, but with a progressively more confronta- tional approach. Last year, when Hong Kong’s Beijing-backed Chief Executive Carrie Lam proposed the extra- dition bill that eventually trig- gered the 2019 protests, Mr. Lee pulled out the playbook he had been using since the late 1980s: helping Hong Kong punch above its weight in its dealings with Beijing by culti- vating allies in Washington. The year of the handover, he met with then-President Clinton, imploring him to watch over the territory. Later, he helped Mr. Clinton per- suade skeptical Democrats to support China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization. Mr. Lee believed membership in the WTO could teach China the sanctity of all its international contracts; China never learned this lesson because it got away with bending WTO rules, he now says. “At the time I said, you must make sure China honors all the terms of these agreements,” Mr. Lee recalled. “Don’t just fold your arms and do nothing.” When his delegation arrived in Washington in May 2019, a more hawkish view was taking hold, drawn from the conclu- sion that decades of economic engagement had failed to turn China into a responsible global partner. In November, Con- gress unanimously passed the human-rights act, an effort “bolstered by the support of pro-democracy leaders like Martin Lee...as well as the many young Hong Kongers who came to Washington,” said Sen. Marco Rubio.

Beijing crackdown In May, China’s National People’s Congress unveiled the outline of the new security law it planned for Hong Kong, and pointed to the overseas lobby- ing by Mr. Lee and others as justification. The full law in- cluded broadly worded new crimes such as foreign collusion and sedition. On one point it was very specific: Go- ing abroad to seek sanctions from foreign governments was explicitly outlawed. Mr. Lee said that because China and the U.K. registered their 1984 accord to transfer Hong Kong as a United Nations treaty, it is the world’s business whether its terms are upheld. With the law in place, democracy advocates have been soul-searching about going into exile. Some left for the U.S. or Europe. At least one group tried to flee by speed- boat to Taiwan, only to be captured on the high seas. In his ninth decade and with a career so freighted with democratic symbolism that his departure would be cause for gloating in Beijing, Mr. Lee said his choice to stay was simple. “If I have the choice of dying peacefully in bed outside Hong Kong, or dying in pain in a Chinese jail, the question for me is not how will I die, but will I go to heaven,” he said, before the law went into effect. “Dying without my con- victions is what would really give me pain.”

Twilight for

Democracy

Fighter

SEOUL—Asian economies
are emerging as clear winners
in the race to a full recovery,
aided by demand from West-
ern shoppers and success in
containing Covid-19, which has
helped the region keep its fac-
tories humming.
China remains on track to
grow nearly 2% this year, the
most of any major economy,
while the world is expected to
contract 4.4% and the U.S.
4.3%, according to the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund. Other
Asian economies are close be-
hind China: Vietnam is ex-
pected to grow 1.6%, Taiwan is
expected to be flat from a year
earlier and South Korea is fore-
cast to contract 1.9%.
But they also derive an es-
pecially large part of their
growth from exports of manu-
factured goods to the rest of
the world, especially the U.S.
and Europe. Asian economies
are among the largest produc-
ers of laptops, communication
equipment, televisions and

other household goods that have experienced surges in demand as the pandemic forced people to stay home. “We call it the Zoom boom,” said Rory Green, an

economist at research firm TS Lombard who covers China and North Asia. A key question is whether all that demand can be sus- tained as Covid-19 caseloads

surge again in the West. Stim- ulus paychecks have been spent and even if cases come down again, there is a limit to how many smartphones and other devices people need to

work and study from home. For now, though, daily life looks much better in many parts of Asia. In Taiwan, an an- nual gay-pride parade drew thousands of people in October. South Korea has hosted international touring performances of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Cats,” as Broadway theaters in New York remain closed. In China, restaurants are buzzing and leisure businesses have reopened, as entertain- ment companies like Walt Dis- ney Co. lay off thousands in the U.S. Domestic airline ca- pacity in China is still about 35% below pre-pandemic lev- els, but that is far better than in the U.S. and Europe, where it is down more than 60%. But containing Covid-19, as many Asian nations have done, isn’t always enough. In Thai- land, where caseloads have been kept low, the economy is expected to contract 7.1% this year, in large part because it is so reliant on international tourism—which has dropped

to effectively zero—according to the Bank of Thailand. A few other countries are also looking bad, including In- dia and the Philippines, which are set to contract 10.3% and 8.3%, respectively. Both were hit particularly hard by Covid-19 and India lacks a big electronics-export industry. In China,Guangzhou Viewo ElectronicsCo., a television exporter, saw orders surge about 50% from a year earlier as soon as the factory reopened from a virus lockdown in March, said Michael Yang, an overseas sales department manager. The company had to hire more workers to cope with all its orders, he said. Demand has been so strong that the company is struggling to keep up. Shortages of raw materials have driven up its prices by 50%, he said. “We continued receiving new orders from our custom- ers,” but the factory can’t ful- fill all of them, Mr. Yang said. —Bingyan Wang contributed to this article.

BYEUN-YOUNGJEONG

Western Demand Bolsters Asian Economies

Leaders of the Pack Manyofthisyear's best-performing economiesareinAsia. Projected real GDP percentage change from 2019 to 2020

Source: International Monetary Fund

–10.0% –5.0 02.

China Vietnam Taiwan Indonesia S. Korea U.S. World Japan Germany Canada Eurozone

Japanese Growth Is Highest in 40 Years

TOKYO—The Japanese economy expanded at its fastest pace in at least 40 years in the July-September period as private consumption and exports improved along with the re- opening of the global economy. The world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China expanded 5% in the third quarter of 2020 from the previous quarter, the first growth in four quarters and the big- gest expansion since 1980, the period for which comparable data are available. The result came after a record drop in the second quarter and was better

than economists’ forecast. On an annualized basis, which reflects what would happen if the third-quarter pace continued for a full year, Japan’s economy expanded 21.4%, compared with a con- sensus forecast of 18.9%. In the third quarter, the nation’s gross domestic product totaled an annualized 508 trillion yen, equivalent to $4.85 trillion, re- covering a little more than half of what it lost in the coronavi- rus pandemic. Private spending rose 4.7% from the previous quarter as consumers went out more for shopping and dining. Economists say any further recovery is likely to be slow in coming quarters. —Megumi Fujikawa

The Wall Street Journal - USA (2020-11-16)

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